This invention relates to a management computer for network management and, more particularly, to a management computer that automatically sets switches constituting a network.
The networking of business operations (including mission-critical applications) in a corporation has lately become increasingly common, which has created a demand for improved network availability.
In a conventional network, a failure in a network device such as a switch or a router is dealt with by the administrator of the network by manually replacing the failed network device. This lowers the availability of the network significantly since communication cannot be held over the network until the failed network device is replaced with a functioning one.
There has been known a protocol called spanning tree protocol (STP). The STP is for controlling switches that constitute a network such that the network recovers automatically from a failure. When a failure occurs in the network, the switches autonomously execute processing of recovering from the network failure using the STP. The STP, with which failure recovery processing is automatically executed upon failure in a network, improves the network availability, compared to manual recovery from a network failure by a network administrator.
A virtual router redundancy protocol (VRRP) and a gigabit switch redundancy protocol (GSRP) are protocols that can improve the network availability even more. The extent to which these protocols are effective for recovery from a failure is limited to adjacent (interconnected) network devices. The VRRP and GSRP are control protocols for redundancy switches formed of an active switch and a standby switch. The VRRP and GSRP win hereinafter be referred to as redundant system control protocols.
With redundant system control protocols whose failure recovery extent is limited to adjacent network appliances, a network can recover from a failure more quickly than when the STP is employed.
To apply a redundant system control protocol, the administrator of a network connects both switches that constitute redundancy switches to other switches in the network. The network administrator then sets an active path which runs through one of the switches constituting the redundancy switches and a standby path which runs through the other switch constituting the redundancy switches. Of the two switches constituting the redundancy switches, the one through which the active path runs is called an active switch and the one through which the standby path runs is called a standby switch.
The network administrator activates the redundant system control protocol between the active switch and the standby switch. The active switch uses the redundant system control protocol to monitor the operation state of the standby switch while the standby switch uses the redundant system control protocol to monitor the operation state of the active switch.
One of ports that the standby switch has is connected to the active switch and the rest of the ports are set to a standby state in which communication is stopped until a failure occurs in the active switch. The ports in the standby state are subjects of automatic recovery processing which is executed with the use of the redundant system control protocol.
In the case where the redundant system control protocol is the GSRP, the network administrator sets one of ports of the active switch that is connected to the standby switch and the port of the standby switch that is connected to the active switch as ports that are used in mutual switch monitoring communication according to the GSRP.